How to Breathe Underwater (17 page)

“Wake up,” he said into her hair. “Melissa’s in the shower. It’s our last chance.” He reached under her skirt and wedged a hand between her legs.

She moved away from him, toward the wall, but he followed, trying to move his hand around inside her panties. She jerked away and stood up on the air mattress, bracing herself against the wall. In her other hand, still hidden beneath her shirt, she held the gun.

“Hi,” he said, and gave her a weak smile.

“Get up,” she said. “Now.”

“Why?” he said.

She pulled the gun from beneath her shirt and pointed it at his head.

His smile fell away. He got to his feet. She could see his thighs contracting as if he meant to jump at her, and she lowered the gun until it pointed at his penis. “Don’t make any fast moves,” she said. “I could shoot you accidentally.”

“Please tell me it’s not loaded.”

“It’s loaded,” Lucy said. “I checked, just like you showed me.” She could shoot him right now. She imagined him lying on the ground, his eyes clouding, saying
It’s not your fault.

Jack’s mouth opened. He pointed to a pair of shorts hanging off the back of a chair. “Okay if I put those on?” he said, trying to smile again.

“No,” she said. “Just get into the closet.”

He opened the closet door. The closet was crammed with papers, clothes, model cars, letters—hundreds of things. Jack had to climb on top of a crate of laundry in order to fit inside. He crouched in the semi-dark, staring at Lucy. “It’s you I love,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

“Bullshit,” Lucy said.

“I mean it. I told Melissa everything.”

“Right,” Lucy said. “After you fucked her.”

“Please, Lucy. Give me the gun.”

Lucy closed the closet door. She took the desk chair and wedged it underneath the doorknob the way she’d seen it done in movies. It seemed to work; he pushed on the door from inside but it didn’t open. She wedged the chair in even tighter. “Stop pushing,” she said, “or I’ll shoot right through this door.”

He stopped pushing.

“You are one greasy motherfucker,” she told him. “Anyone can see it.”

“But I love you.”

“I’ll shoot your ass off,” she said, pointing the gun at the closet door.

“You know, it’s dark in here, Lucy. And it smells bad.”

“It’s your closet, not mine.”

There was a scream. Melissa stood in the doorway, a towel clutched to her chest.

“Be quiet,” Lucy said, and pointed the gun at her. “Jack’s mom is sleeping.”

“The gun,” she said.

“Get your stuff,” Lucy said. “Hurry up.”

“Oh, shit, Lucy, don’t point that thing at me. I mean it.”

“We’re going home,” Lucy told her. “Get some clothes on.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Yes you are,” Lucy said.

“What are you going to do, shoot me?”

“Is that a dare?”

“This is ridiculous, Lucy.”

“No it isn’t. You’re getting your stuff, and we’re going home.” Lucy picked up Melissa’s bag and threw it at her, trying to remember if she’d ever once before told Melissa what to do. It felt clean and right. “Pack your clothes,” she said. She had to get them out of there, because in another minute she was going to start to freak.

Melissa struggled into her black crocheted dress and high heels. She stuffed the thigh-highs into her overnight bag and looked up at Lucy.

“Stand up,” Lucy said. By this time the gun felt as if it were part of her hand, a magic finger she could point to make things happen. Melissa stood. Lucy took her by the arm and led her out into the hall.

“All right, all right,” Melissa said, twisting her arm away from Lucy. “You don’t have to pinch me like that.”

Jack rattled the closet door again. Lucy let him do it. It was time to go now, down the hall, past the door of Jack’s mom’s bedroom and the photographs of Jack as a little kid, and then down the stairs to the scroll-and-rose living room and out the front door and into the yard. All along the street the sad Tudor houses were jaundiced with morning sun. Melissa stumbled down the front walk, the black bag bumping against her hip.

“Come on,” Lucy said, and took her around to the passenger side of the car. Lucy got in on the driver’s side, throwing their clothes into the back seat. When she started the car, the roar of the engine felt sweet and strong. She pulled out and drove toward the highway, cranking DJ Mellow B on WLUX. He was playing Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?” The gun was in Lucy’s lap, within plain sight of anyone who wanted to look into the car. She tucked it into the waistband of her skirt. Melissa sat huddled against the passenger-side door and stared through the windshield, unblinking.

The sounds of Motown followed them, the Supremes and the Four Tops and the Marvelettes crooning them all the way onto the open highway. After a few miles Melissa reached for a cigarette and lit it, rolling down the window to blow smoke.

“Jack told me about going to see you,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “He told me everything you did.”

Lucy squinted at the road. “He did?”

“Yeah.” She made a short harsh sound in her throat, half laughter, half disgust, and tapped a bit of ash out the window. “He said he didn’t want any secrets between us. But it sounded more like he was bragging about how great you thought he was.”

“He wasn’t so great.”

“God, what an asshole. Who knows who else he would have fucked before we made it to LA?”

“He tried to have sex with me this morning,” Lucy said. “After he took a shower. That’s why I put him in the closet.”

“I’m not surprised,” Melissa said. “He’s got a serious dick problem. He’s got hyperdickia.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said. “He’s terminal.”

Melissa put an elbow against the window and stared out at the passing rows of corn. “I feel sorry for our parents,” she said. “They have no idea what goes on.”

“At least you’re not running away to California.”

“Not this week.”

Five minutes from Lucy’s neighborhood, they stopped at a gas station and changed into jeans in the restroom. They fixed their makeup in the mirror and brushed their teeth. Lucy extracted the gun from the waistband of her skirt, where it had pressed painfully against her side. She and Melissa wrapped it in a paper towel and buried it in the garbage can. Silent and exhausted, they drove toward Lucy’s house. As they rounded the corner of her street, Lucy could already imagine the way the house would smell when she opened the door: clean and dry, like fresh laundry. She could enter that house and go upstairs. She could take a shower. She could crawl into bed.

When they pulled up in front, her parents were planting flats of marigolds in the flower beds along the driveway. They wore gardening clogs and Michigan visors, and her mother had on her I DIG GARDENING T-shirt. Seeing them made Lucy want to cry with relief. Her mother lifted her trowel and waved.

Lucy touched Melissa’s arm. “Go straight home,” she said.

“I will,” Melissa said. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

Lucy got out of the car and took her bag from the back seat. She slammed the door and watched the long white Cadillac ease away from the curb. After the car had turned the corner, she kissed her mother and father and went upstairs to her room. She threw her overnight bag into the closet. She turned down the covers of her bed, where Jack Jacob had touched her but would never touch her again. Then she went to the bathroom to take a shower, and when she took off her clothes she could still see the outline of the gun, plain as a photograph, against her skin.

What We Save

From the monorail Helena could see topiary cut into the shapes of giraffes and elephants and birds. Her sister Margot pressed her nose against the glass, watching, but their mother didn’t even look out the window. Instead she sat with her chin on her hands, staring into the empty aisle. They shot past a lake full of flamingoes, then threaded their way through what seemed like an endless parking lot. Near the ticket gates, a voice announced that they had reached their final stop. Helena had to touch her mother’s shoulder to bring her back from wherever she’d gone in her mind. They stood and moved toward the monorail doors with all the other families. The doors slid open to admit a blast of thick wet heat, and Helena and her mother and sister stepped out into it.

It was nine o’clock already. By now the Sewalds would be waiting for them at the landscaped Mickey Mouse head, but there was a long line at the ticket counter. As they joined the back of the line, Helena’s mother straightened her wig and looked at her watch, and Margot jumped in place, her brown curls flapping against her neck. Blood thrummed in the backs of Helena’s legs. She wished she were back in the hotel with her father, listening to him prepare his lecture on T-cells. The last thing she felt like doing right now was walking around a theme park with her mother’s high school boyfriend and his family. Her mother had been in love with Brian Sewald and had gone to the prom with him nineteen years earlier. Every year at Christmas they received a postcard from the Sewald family: blond Brian, his wife, and their twin sons, in bathing suits on the beach, with the caption
Holiday greetings from
Florida!

This past winter, Helena’s mother had studied the postcard for a long moment before putting it up on the refrigerator. In the photo Brian was almost bald. “He used to have such beautiful hair,” she said to Helena.

Helena sat quiet and looked at her mother’s own hair, sparse and feathery as the down of a baby bird.

“It’s always nice to get a postcard,” her mother said, staring out into the frozen garden. In high school, when Brian was failing History, Helena’s mother had tutored him so he could stay on the swim team. His grades improved, he led the team to a state championship, and after dinner one night he asked Helena’s mother to the prom. She tried to hide her surprise, but then she overturned her plate of blackberry pie into the lap of her yellow dress. Helena had seen the dress with its faded blue stain. Her mother kept it in the attic, packed away in mothballs.

Now Brian was an engineering professor at the University of Miami and had a small boat he sailed on the weekends with his family. The postcard showed the two Sewald boys, tanned and wearing turquoise bathing trunks, sitting on the edge of the beached sailboat, holding its rudder and ropes. They were sixteen now, two years older than Helena. She liked their sharp looks—their flat slim muscles and high cheekbones and the near-white hair hanging blunt against their foreheads. One of the boys grinned into the camera, his eyes narrowed by the sun. The other boy’s eyes were shadowed beneath the fall of his hair, and his upper lip was curled. He seemed about to say something mean to his mother, who was crouched in the hollow of the boat. Nora Sewald, a slim brunette in a red tank suit, rested her hands on her sons’ shoulders and laughed. Brian stood in front of the boat, one foot planted before him in the sand, his body angled slightly toward his family as if to say proudly,
This is what I’ve done.

By the time they received the Sewalds’ holiday card, the cancer had already moved into Helena’s mother’s liver. There had been talk for a while about a bone marrow transplant, but her doctors had ruled it out; her body was already too weak. Now Helena’s mother took Taxol twice a month, a thin red chemo made from Pacific yew trees. Every other Wednesday she would come home pale and speechless from the hospital and make casseroles, riding out the last few hours before the drugs hit her full-force. Helena and her sister and father would eat the casseroles for the next three days while her mother lay in bed or on the bathroom floor, in alternate states of retching, fever, and cold. The medical conference in Orlando fell during one of her mother’s chemo-free weeks, and they decided that a family trip—this normal thing, something other families did—would be good for all of them. But a family trip wasn’t supposed to include seeing your high school boyfriend. That should have seemed obvious to everyone, Helena thought, particularly to her father. It frightened her that he hadn’t objected, though she could not have explained why.

They could see the gray spires of Cinderella’s Castle in the distance, a sight that had once filled Helena’s chest with a glad ache. Now, as she watched her mother pull at the collar of her shirt and check her brown shoulder-length wig in a tiny compact mirror, the spires seemed like an obstacle, like mountains they’d have to cross.

“Does it look all right?” her mother asked, frowning into the mirror and pulling a few bangs toward the center of her forehead. “To me it doesn’t look any better than the other ones.”

“It looks natural,” Helena said. “It’s much better than the other ones.” It was the truth, but she hated the wig anyway. Her mother’s hair had been curly and long, a dark red-brown. Her friend Maya Kearn, a painter, had once portrayed her wearing nothing but that hair. Maya was an old college room-mate of her mother’s, disabled in a car crash, and Helena stretched canvases and ran errands for her on the weekends. Six years earlier, Maya had painted Helena’s mother nursing Margot in a red velvet chair. In the painting Helena’s mother was nude, and her hair fell around her body in loose waves.

“Nine-fifteen,” Helena’s mother said, looking at her watch. She craned her neck to check the length of the line, the tendons pulling beneath her skin. Helena worried that her mother would get heat exhaustion or something worse, standing in that line. The last time they’d all gone out together— it was to a street art fair where Maya Kearn had displayed her Wheelchair Nudes, along with a couple of Helena’s own collages—her mother had been walking along, holding Margot’s hand, when she suddenly turned pale and pitched forward onto the sidewalk. She knelt there holding her belly, silent and gray-faced, while Helena’s father pushed back onlookers with his long arms, his cool physician’s voice edging into panic as he told Helena to call EMS. The ambulance moved tar-slow through the masses of people; that was how it seemed to Helena as she knelt next to her mother, holding the ends of her head kerchief away from her face as she coughed and dry-heaved. That time the CAT scans had revealed that the breast cancer had moved to her abdomen and into her ovaries, causing them to swell and finally burst, and the doctors performed emergency surgery. Helena’s mother woke to learn that she’d had a hysterectomy. “Your father fainted to the floor when he saw the scans,” she told Helena as she drifted back from anesthesia. Helena’s father was an oncologist.

Later, as her mother slept, Helena asked her father if he had really fainted.

“The rumors are true,” he said quietly, adjusting the blanket over Helena’s mother’s feet.

“How bad is it?” Helena asked.

“We’ll see.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked at his wife. Her chest rose and fell, and her skin looked paper-thin in the fluorescent hospital light.

Helena wanted her father to be powerful, to speak with conviction about new things they could try. She’d seen videotapes of cancer cells multiplying and extruding into healthy tissues, and she imagined that taking place now, within her mother’s body. She wanted her father to reach in and put a stop to it. But he sat down in a vinyl chair beside the bed, his hands limp at his sides, a thin man exhausted from worry. Helena looked at her mother asleep on the bed, her arms bruised from blood draws and injections, and felt as if her own chest were being crushed to a tiny knot.

When they reached the front of the line, Helena’s mother had to root around in her straw shoulder bag for the special convention coupons. Helena heard the children behind them whispering, and she thought she heard one of them say
wig.
She turned around and met the eyes of a dough-faced redheaded boy. His mouth opened dumbly as Helena threw him her Killing Stare. Finally Helena’s mother unloaded the contents of her bag onto the ticket counter. There was the suntan lotion, her checkbook, the makeup compact, a hairbrush, and a square black velvet box with a gold clasp, which Helena had never seen before. Helena picked up the box and turned it over in her hands.

“That’s not for you,” her mother said, and took it away.

“Is that a present?” Margot asked.

Helena’s mother shook her head, continuing to pile things onto the counter until she found the vouchers in their crumpled envelope. Then she paid the ticket man, swept everything back into her bag, and at last they entered the park.

Helena’s mother walked ahead of her daughters, her back narrow beneath a white cotton shirt, her brown highlighted hair blowing in the hot breeze. Margot and Helena almost had to jog to keep with her as she wove through the mass of Hawaiian-shirted parents and sweaty sunburned kids. The air smelled of funnel cakes and French fries and Copper-tone, and underneath it all was the green mildewy smell of Orlando, the thick tropical humidity you had to work hard to breathe. Helena’s arms and legs, bare for the first time after three months of Michigan winter, felt naked and spindly.

“There they are,” her mother said, turning back toward her daughters. She licked her thumb and wiped a tiny orange stain from Margot’s cheek. To Helena she said, “Stand up straight.” Helena pulled her shoulders back until her mother turned away.

The Sewalds were not hard to recognize—a tall bronzed family in colorful clothes, standing near the stone ledge in front of the landscaped Mickey Mouse head. They seemed comfortable there, a natural part of the music and bright paint of the park. Helena’s mother raised her chin and touched her hair as she headed toward them. Brian Sewald looked just as he did in his Christmas photograph—like someone who played a lot of golf. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a red-and-white-striped polo shirt, and his skin was so tan and smooth it looked polished. When he saw Helena’s mother he opened his arms and walked toward her. He embraced her and kissed her forehead. Nora Sewald flashed a gummy smile, then came forward and kissed Margot, mashing her little glasses askew. To Helena she gave a cold fluttering pat on the back. The last time they’d seen the Sewalds, Helena, five years old, had spilled grape juice on Nora’s linen tablecloth. Helena’s mother had offered to clean it for her, but Nora had said sharply, “No. Just leave it for the maid.”

Nora may have been Tropicana Queen two years in a row, but Helena’s mother was a pediatrician and had tutored Nora’s husband. Helena had gotten the sense, even at that disastrous lunch, that her mother made Nora feel uninteresting and slow.

“Well, now,” Brian Sewald said, holding Helena’s mother at arm’s length. His eyes traveled slowly from her highlighted wig to her sharp collarbone to her thin chest. “How’s Nancy-Nancy?” He waited for her to say something, but she just raised the corner of her mouth in an unhappy half smile. After a moment he blinked hard and turned away.

“You’re tall,” Margot said, looking up at Brian.

“That’s what I’m told,” he said. He scruffed Margot’s bangs and tweaked the ear of her Mickey Mouse hat. Then he turned to Helena. “Look at you,” he said, reaching forward to squeeze her arm. “You’ve become a real lady.” She smiled to be polite, then stepped away, crossing her arms over her small new breasts.

“Your sons have grown too,” Helena’s mother said brightly.

Nora Sewald leaned close to Helena’s mother. “Don’t tell them they look big,” she whispered. “They’re trying to lose weight for wrestling.” She held Helena’s mother’s shoulders in her hands and stood behind her. “This is Daddy’s friend,” she said slowly to the boys. “Louis, Jeremy, you remember her, don’t you? They remember you, Nancy. They’re shy.”

The twins nodded to Helena’s mother, then looked at Margot and Helena. Helena pulled her sister in front of her. “This is Margot,” she said. “She wasn’t born last time we saw you.”

The twins muttered a greeting.

“Which one’s who?” Margot said.

“Louis is the one with the faggy earring,” one of them said. He pointed to a tiny silver hoop in his brother’s left earlobe. Louis mock-punched Jeremy in the gut.

“Nice touch, huh?” Brian came over to lay a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “I look away for one minute, and they’re putting holes in themselves.” Brian shook his head, and Louis glanced at Helena. She smiled a little and rolled her eyes.

A ponytailed Disney photographer approached them and asked if they would like to have their picture taken with the beautifully landscaped Mickey Mouse head behind them. The Mickey Mouse head, she told them, consisted of forty different kinds of vegetation from all over the world, including three varieties of fern that were now extinct in the rain forests but preserved here by the careful hands of Disney landscapers.

“We want a picture, don’t we?” Brian Sewald said to Helena’s mother.

“Maybe just the kids,” Helena’s mother said.

“Oh, nonsense,” Nora said, and touched Nancy’s hair. “Everything looks fine.” Nora’s own hair hung glossy and dark, chin length, and her skin shone pink with health. She linked arms with Helena’s mother and faced the photographer.

The Sewald boys stood behind Nora, and Helena’s mother held Margot’s hand. Helena found herself standing between Brian Sewald and her mother.

“On three, now,” the photographer said, stepping back with the camera ready.

Just then Helena’s mother began to cough, wet and deep in her chest. She bent at the waist and held her hand in front of her mouth, her shoulders jerking. After a few moments she gasped for breath and wiped her eyes.

The photographer lowered her camera and waited. Helena’s mother’s eyes were still tearing, and her face had flushed red. She coughed again and shook the hair out of her face, one hand open on her chest. Shuddering a little, she began to breathe slowly and deeply. Helena fished a tissue from her pocket and wiped the circles of mascara from beneath her mother’s eyes.